Category: Tommy Ramone

Good morning, K-SAT readers. It’s month 3 on the calendar, so I’m mining chapter 3 of Stealing All Transmissions for a couple more gems that I hope you’ll fancy. In “1977: Clamor, Exposure, and Camaraderie,” I move through ’76 and the formation of The Clash into 1977, and map what’s happening in the new periodicals popping up in New York, including Punk and New York Rocker.

Robert Christgau reported that he and Richard Goldstein picked up The Clash’s debut on import vinyl at Bleecker Bob’s, put it on the turntable, and the response? “‘This is fucking great!'” There is, of course, so much that is great about their eponymous debut (I love using the word “eponymous”), and I think about Simonon having just learned his parts, and the joy and the frustration and the catharsis in “Janie Jones,” the (ironic) contempt of “Hate and War,” and the beautiful treble-y-ness of it all. I also think about the question of duration. You’ve got 14 tracks here: four are up-and-done in under two minutes; five more take but 30 seconds more.

At the time, Christgau and his comrades at the Village Voice loved popular music, but they also liked to celebrate newcomers, too, as reflected in the Pazz and Jop polls of 1976 and 1977:

Now there’s a more scientific way to do this, of course, but let’s just look at the #1s here: Stevie Wonder’s Songs: 17 tracks, 85 minutes, and The Pistols’ Bollocks: 11 tracks, 34 minutes. Certainly Graham Parker and The Ramones heralded a shift in median song duration, but wow: what a difference a year makes.

The Clash doesn’t make the list, I believe, because the folks at the Voice, including Christgau, discovered the album in early 1978. (He would later claim it as his favorite Clash LP, and even his favorite punk LP, if I recall correctly.)

The name of this band is … Ramones. Image by Moshe Brakha.

You can find the full polls here and here. And, if you’re paying close attention, you’ll see that the LPs included here by the band “Ramones” did not include a definite article. Like “Talking Heads.” Now, you might find the occasional book that identifies (correctly) “CBGB” rather than “CBGBs,” but I’ve never seen a book refer to this band as “Ramones,” without the “the.” The iconic t-shirt, of course, notes “Ramones,” but all the writers got it wrong. Pretty wild.

Happy Sunday, readers! As implied in the title, today’s entry hews close to vulgarly commercial, but maybe to your advantage, so here goes.

On the my-loss-your-gain side of the coin: my publisher’s running a big sale in the US — half off all stuff through December (pmpress.org, coupon “holiday”). There’s many gems to be had and it’s all for a good cause: your waxing rhapsodically about our youth and music with greater accuracy.

I’m sharing a two-page spread from the book today, which you can rotate counter-clockwise in your browser. (I tried to fix this myself, to no avail.) It covers the rise of excitement at CBGB about The Ramones and others, and the engagement of key journalists to aid the renaissance of rock, rebellion, and fun. And, of course, there’s the great confluence of forces on April 23, 1976, and the formation of The Clash shortly thereafter.

It is also the 35th anniversary of the release of London Calling in the UK, which highlights one of the funnier moments of the era. In the UK, LC was released in the 70s. In the US, LC came out the following month, and eventually was named the best album of the 80s.